Rob McEwen wrote:
Additionally, I'd like to ask, other than being a superb cash-generating
machine, what good is a whitelist built upon pay-to-enter and NOT based
on editorial decisions made by non-biased e-mail administrators?
Those two aren't necessarily exclusive. The standards for inclusion in a
whitelist can (and in many cases do) include the same performance metrics
that help e-mail administrators stay non-biased, such as user complaint
rate, spamtrap hits, and so forth.
(I don't know whether Barracuda's whitelist includes those metrics.)
The additional value to admins is that they don't have to keep watch over
the whitelisted IPs -- the whitelist operator handles that. The fees cover
that monitoring, and consulting on improving practices where necessary.
And, of course, if the whitelist operator is lying or slow or otherwise not
living up to expectations, the admin simply stops using that whitelist.
Lists that nobody uses don't get much business, so there's a direct
incentive for the whitelist operator to keep their list squeaky-clean.
--
J.D. Falk
Return Path Inc
http://www.returnpath.net/
